Amazon Web Services Deploys Nvidia Grid Accelerators

Nvidia Corp. said on Tuesday that its Grid technology is now available from Amazon Web Services (AWS) through its newly announced Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) G2 instance, delivering GPU acceleration to users running graphics-intensive applications and games in the cloud.

This expands the uses of cloud computing from storage, data processing and 2D applications to 3D, fully GPU-accelerated, interactive consumer and professional applications. With Nvidia Grid GPUs, software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies can now build cloud-based offerings with extreme graphics performance for design, visualization, media creation, games and more. AWS is offering an Nvidia Grid GPU instance, known as the G2 instance, via its Amazon EC2 cloud, starting today.

"AWS sees a growing benefit for adding GPUs to our cloud. The Nvidia Grid GPUs in our new G2 instances enable graphical applications to be rendered in the AWS cloud and streamed to a world with increasing internet bandwidth and proliferation of device types," said Matt Wood, general manager of data science at AWS.

Nvidia Grid GPUs make possible a new generation of GPU-accelerated SaaS applications – such as virtual workstations, accelerated virtual desktops and gaming-as-a-service. Based on the Nvidia Kepler architecture, Grid GPUs include a powerful H.264 encoding engine that lets high-resolution graphics be compressed in real time and streamed to any internet-connected display.

As a result, Internet-connected devices – such as PCs, Macs, tablets, the Nvidia Shield, smart TVs, micro-consoles or smartphones – can tap the tremendous power of GPUs to meet the needs of scientists, researchers, designers, engineers, gamers and more.

“Cloud computing has reached an inflection point driven by the growing variety of devices that can take advantage of application streaming. By using the graphics horsepower of Nvidia Grid on AWS, companies can stream applications to more customers on more screens with a lower barrier to entry," said Jeff Brown, vice president and general manager of the professional visualization business at Nvidia.

To make it easy for software companies to deploy applications onto G2 instances, OTOY has enabled a Windows- and Linux-based Amazon Machine Image (AMI) with OTOY's ORBX middleware. SaaS companies can install their applications into OTOY's AMI and begin streaming to web browsers within minutes.

To demonstrate the potential of app streaming on Nvidia Grid, OTOY and Autodesk are collaborating on technology that offers Autodesk's most popular design applications through an OTOY AMI.